Defending the Culture of Death

It was thrilling to see that over a million people came out into the streets in Paris alone yesterday to stand against murderous jihadism. It will be less thrilling, I suspect, to watch what happens in France now as the government tries to figure out how to stop it. But good luck to them, certainly.

To a remarkable extent, American political and cultural thinking takes place within well-worn, familiar grooves. The right is religious; the left is secular. The right frets about sexual liberation; the left cheers it. The right valorizes markets; the left views them with suspicion. The right praises individualism; the left longs for solidarity. The right defends nations and borders; the left longs for universalism. The right worries about the collapse of authority and the rise or moral and cultural decadence; the left does not.

In a series of earlier novels and essays, as well as in the Paris Review interview, Houellebecq has showed that he descends intellectually from a tradition of French culture that thoroughly scrambles these seemingly settled categories. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swiss by birth), Auguste Comte, and Emil Cioran (Romanian by birth) before him, Houellebecq personally rejects religion in all of its available institutional forms, while at the same time feeling personally drawn to it and believing (as he puts it in the interview) that society cannot “survive without religion” and that “religion, of some kind, is necessary.” Indeed, Houellebecq suspects that France may be on the cusp of a resurgence of faith: “I think there is a real need for God and that the return of religion is not a slogan but a reality.”

Such statements make Houellebecq sound like a relatively straightforward French analogue to the millions of Americans who make up the religious right.

But it’s not true. More Linker:

Comte, one of Houellebecq’s heroes, looked for salvation from the miseries of his own time (the mid-19th century) in the advent of a new “religion of humanity” that would succeed Christianity and the “abstract” character of modernity. But Houellebecq sees in all such human-centered proposals just another “philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone.” The religion we need cannot be a religion of humanity. It must be a religion of submission to something higher or greater than mankind.

Why not a return to Catholicism in France? Houellebecq is open to that possibility. Compared to philosophies derived from the Enlightenment, “Catholicism…is doing rather well.” Yet Islam — the very name means submission of the will to God — intrigues him more, in part because the Catholic Church appears to have “already run its course, it seems to belong to the past, it has defeated itself. Islam is an image of the future.”

That is what makes the plot of Submission so chilling. Far from blaming the rise of Islam in France on the immigration of foreigners who impose it on their host society through terrorism or post-colonial guilt-mongering, Houellebecq paints a picture of a near future in which formerly secular men and women deliberately choose to embrace Islam.

Read all of Linker’s piece. He says even if we conclude that Houellebecq’s novel is a fantasy with little chance of coming through, we will learn a lot if we consider that he might be right. I agree with this. Here’s an excerpt from a New York Review of Books (paywalled) piece Mark Lilla did in 2000 about the publication of Houellebecq’s sensational novel The Elementary Particles:

The Elementary Particles is a reworking of this idea, especially through the character of Bruno. What got it more attention than the early novel was Houellebecq’s wicked sendup of the soixante-huitards, the student rebels of 1968 who raged against the machine of capitalism and dug up “the beach below the pavement,” but who turned out to be more radical individualists than their parents and bosses. Houellebecq shares a common French interpretation of the Sixties, quite different from our own and quite refreshing. While many Americans see the Sixties as a step in the steady march of democracy—the extension of the domain of struggle, so to speak—many Frenchmen have come to see the events of 1968 as marking the triumph of a new social ideal of individualism, and the snapping of the last attachments of solidarity binding French society together. The family, the Church, the republican schools, even the Communist Party suffered a crisis of legitimacy, from which they have not recovered, in the name of the individual’s right to self-determination, a right that has become the sole measure of social legitimacy. Such individualism lies at the heart of Americans’ self-understanding as a people but it is a new idea in Europe and it makes the French particularly uneasy.

Houellebecq knows exactly how to play off this discomfort by insinuating the existence of a world-historical process that is smashing the complex molecules of human existence into smaller and smaller particles spinning in space. That process, he seems to believe, reached its final stage in the Sixties. In one of his unguarded essays in the collection Rester vivant, he recounts what it was like being a ten-year-old in 1968 and thinking something important might be happening. But he now sees that “afterward, the social machine began to turn even more rapidly, pitilessly, and May ‘68 only served to break the few moral rules that still served to brake its voracious operation.” In this machine, everything is coordinated. The forces of neoliberal economics have succeeded in breaking down the last barriers to unfettered global competition—unions, labor laws, tariffs, subsidies, national preferences, even national currencies. (Houellebecq publicly opposed the Maastricht Treaty.)

The sexual revolution has done its part by opening the couple to permanent, relentless sexual competition, aided by feminism, which has encouraged young women to enter this and every other market, while offering solace to resentful older women made redundant. Men have reveled in their new freedom but also felt the sting of competition in the new sexual marketplace, becoming obsessed with their bodies and regressing to the oral stage of sexual development. Children now grow up with parents too selfish and harried to care for them and are abandoned in the sexual jungle to look for love at an early age. Those who succeed as adolescents become slaves as adults to a regime of dieting, exercise, antidepressants, breast augmentation, penile enhancement, and liposuction, in a vain effort to maintain their competitive edge. Those who fail are given boxes of condoms in school and told to keep their chins up. You can see them in any classroom: their hair dyed, their bodies pierced to enhance their ugliness. They are lonely, depressed, self-loathing.

Lilla concludes:

Clotted with confused theoretical speculations, The Elementary Particles is not a distinguished literary work; but it is a very knowing evocation of the night thoughts disturbing the slumber of the French centrist republic today. It will be interesting to see what sort of echo it has in the United States. Individualism, the collapse of authority, the breakdown of the family, pop-culture decadence, globalization, the flexible workplace, genetic engineering—we have different ways of conceiving and worrying about these problems. The American left objects to some of them, the right anguishes about others, but no one sees them all connected in the way Houellebecq does, certainly no American novelist. That may reflect our equanimity and common sense. Or it may mean that Houellebecq is on to something.

I thought about that this weekend when I saw a photo of a blasphemously anti-Christian cover that Charlie Hebdo once published (it depicts the Holy Trinity having three-way anal sex). It would not occur to me that anyone should lay a hand on the Charlie Hebdo artists or editors who produced that filth. I do not want to live in a political order in which cretins like that have to fear for their safety, much less jail. I really do believe that if the Islamists start by shooting blasphemous cartoonists, they will end by shooting Christians, as they have done in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and other places.

But the decadence represented by Charlie Hebdo is probably a greater threat to Western civilization than anything the Islamists can dream up, and it’s important to keep that straight even as we defend the right to free expression and a free press. It destroys everything for the sake of … what, exactly? Charlie Hebdo was straightforward about its far-left agenda of driving all religion out of society. Houellebecq, who is not a religious believer, asks: what are people supposed to live by, then? Man cannot thrive without religion, he believes — and he believes this as a matter of sociology, not theology.

I recently ordered Patrick Leigh Fermor’s thin little 1957 book, A Time to Keep Silence, about his stays in three monasteries. He writes in the early pages about a visit to the Abbey of St. Wandrille, in northern France, which goes back to the seventh century. Excerpt:

When the French Revolution came the abolition of all the religious houses of France. The monks were scattered, the library was split up and auctioned and the conventual buildings were sold. Most of the old abbey church was pulled down, and the masonry carted off and disposed of by the ton as building material.

In 1894, after nearly a century away, the monks returned. But in 1901, anti-monastic laws once again emptied the abbeys of France. Eventually some monks returned, somehow.

This is what the party of Charlie Hebdo has done to France since 1789: murdered its Christian soul, and called it progress. To be fair, European countries that did not go through such a vicious and sustained campaign against the church are doing no better in keeping their faith. Still, France’s spiritual malaise has not been imposed by anybody; it is an act of civilizational suicide.

Again, I would a thousand times prefer to live under the regime of Charlie Hebdo-ism than Islam. But except in the cases of Islamic fundamentalists, I would much rather have observant Muslims as my neighbors and my children’s playmates than someone with Charlie Hebdo‘s worldview. The vitality in Charlie Hebdo-ism is nihilistic, it seems to me. Scrolling my Facebook feed last night, I found this New York magazine feature about the season premiere of HBO’s Girls, which featured a scene in which a man performs oral sex on his girlfriend’s anus. It turns out that this is a thing in pop culture now. Here is the actress from the scene on how her parents support her career:

How do you tell your family. Are you like, “Dad, sit this one out”?

No, also because of my wiring, I was like, “Any advice? What do you guys think in terms of what adhesive I should use?” I got some advice from my parents, because they too are veterans of the show, so their thinking has changed as well. I’d get a call from my mom and she’d be like, “Maybe if you took a thong and cut it away from the sides but you stuck it on in the front and the back it could work.” I was like, “Mom, I like your thinking.” Just your regular dinner conversation! We’re changing as a family; it’s lovely.

No, it’s degenerates raising degenerates. More from that piece, this from an actor on the show:

Alex Karpovsky: Yeah! Let’s do it! Let’s go there! Let’s explore all the cavities. Yeah, 2015 is the Butt Year. There is some type of sexual revolution happening, and maybe that’s one of the cliffs or peaks that we need to begin to incorporate into our societal representation of this revolution, specifically in television. This could be the year of the anus.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: life, liberty, and the year of the anus. I think Michel Houellebecq understands this decadent culture better than most.

An Orthodox Christian friend out West says that he often runs across conservatives these days who are willing to let the broader culture go to hell as long as it leaves them alone. “But it won’t leave you alone,” he replies. And he talks about how his parish is pretty faithful, but so many of the kids raised in it still get sucked in and away from their faith by the culture of Lena Dunham, of Charlie Hebdo, and the rest. The corrosiveness of the broader culture on faith is profound. We can (and should) get all Benedict Option-y about it — I really think there’s no other rational way to respond — but we should not be under any illusions that there is a foolproof way to avoid Weimar America and its suicidal tendencies. The best we can do is to improve the odds for our children.

I don’t know what’s coming. Nobody wants to live under hard Islamism. The Islamists have nowhere built a society capable of thriving. But at the same time, the society the West has built and is building without God or any kind of sacred values other than the Self cannot be said to be thriving either. Could it be that a soft Islamism, along the lines of the AK Party in Turkey, might one day appeal to the French, who cannot or will not return to Christianity? I think it must be unlikely. But not impossible. Which is Linker’s — and Houellebecq’s — point.

We are morally compelled to defend artists and journalists against those who would kill them for what they draw or say. But we should be clear that we are defending one culture of death from another one.

UPDATE: Reader Hector writes:

I had an interesting exchange on Facebook with my friend the other day. He’s in his mid-20s and an ultra-atheist ethnic Jew, with very little fondness for religion, to give you some context. Here’s what he says about the rise of Islamism.

“I think a big part of this is that modern western life really is alienating and empty and meaningless. When you listen to interviews of the western people who ran away to Syria or whatever, they’ll talk about how they listened to pop music and f*cked girls and did drugs but that it didn’t provide any meaning. I think some of it is a symptom of nobody believing anything anymore. Communism is dead, ethnic nationalism is dead. We’re just all supposed to try to collect as much money as we can and then die, and Islamic fundementalism is an attractive ideology relative to that.”

If this is true, and I think it is (George Orwell provided a very similar explanation of why people turned to Fascism, in The Road to Wigan Pier), then the current spiritual malaise in the west isn’t the result of the success of the Left, but rather of its failure. Liberalism, after all (specifically the French, Wellbeck brand of liberalism) never conceived itself as a grand project of the left, but rather of the centre- the ideology of the middle class, opposed to aristocratic conservatism and proletarian socialism. The Left was supposed to provide (in the New Socialist Man) a better substitute for the kind of meaning and brotherhood that the feudal era had purported to provide in Catholic Christianity. Well, now the old feudal-Christian values are gone, but real old-line socialism is gone too (at least in western Europe) and all that’s left is the spiritual and moral vacuum of liberalism. It’s in that spiritual vacuum, where crown, altar, and working class solidarity have all lost their ability to move people, that you get people turning to ideologies like Islamism (or on the flip side, to National Front-ism, which seems like it’s increasingly defining itself in purely negative terms as the opposition to Islam.)

Whatever this is, it wasn’t what the victory of the Left was supposed to be about.

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215 Responses to Defending the Culture of Death

“I will never understand the contention that because popular culture is chosen, it is beyond critique.”

No one is saying anything is beyond critique but one must also judicious with one’s time and taste. Which is why very few conservative publications, religious or secular, review the latest Phillip Roth novel or Madonna album or porno flick because there’s no point in it. You know exactly what you’re going to get and it has absolutly has nothing to do with what you’re writing about or what you believe in. So why concern yourself if only because your thirsty for more “outrage” to drink?

Nor will I understand the claim that if individual you don’t avail yourself of something, then it cannot be said to affect you. It’s as if there were no such thing as society. You may not go to the Nuremberg Rally, but if all your neighbors do, you’re going to feel it.

That’s because the Nuremberg Rally is a public event and if your neighbors go to it in broad daylight it says something about them, now doesn’t it? However, what your neighbors decide to do inside their homes (legally of course) is up to them so long as they don’t take it outside on the lawn. And you may well be surprised what their tastes are when they’re not having Sunday dinner. Or you may not want to know, which is even better and should put your mind at ease. It should be none of your concern.

This is at the heart of the libertarianism you wish to cast your lot with, however reluctantly, in a post-Christian society in other posts of yours because you wish to have “free speech” or “free expression” for your own usage. So do, I take it, the cast and the writers of “Girls”. Now you can call it decadent if you wish, but it seems to me, on some days anyways, you wish to do a lot more than just that. Free speech on Monday, censorship on Tuesday? I think you’ll find it a lot easier just to change the channel or cut the cable altogether or be judicious in children’s selections of friends or even your own friends than to make decisions for the rest of society.

“And no, I’d much rather live in a society full of men like Pavel Rasta than one of men like Bernie Madoff.

Why? If choose not to invest my money with Madoff, I’m no worse off. But Rastas of the world will blow up my neighborhood whether I like it or not for their stupid wars and then will call it “collateral damage.”

Yes I agree, Kiev is at the heart of this dispute but I see no willingness on either side right now for any possible long-term solution.

“Red herring alert! Please read “Candide” as a corrective to the notion that the Enlightenment was about Pollyanna-style utopianism.”

Candide was a polemics against a strawman version of Leibniz’s theodicy – and for sure Voltaire conclusions are pessimistic. However, the discussion within Aufklärung/Illuminisme can be summarized as follows, in a theatrical way (hypersimplification warning)

Act I

Leibniz (Theodicy): – This is the best possible world
Voltaire (Candide): – Well, best or not, it sucks
Rousseau (Émile): – But Man is intrinically good, so we can change the world for better…

“What I like about screeds like that, in the process of arguing that something like 99% of your neighbors are fools living lives devoid of meaning, you also scream its the LIBERALS who have no respect for the common man…”

I may well deserve to be scolded for my ‘screed’: stream-of-consciousness-like style is not a good Conservative one. And it also impairs clarity, since I struggle to understand where I have said what you say.

I actually think that most of people is in a quest for meaning, one way or another. And that the most common answer in our times is Rod’s cherished concept ofMTD, which – if unsatisfactory as all self-serving answers, is at least palliative.

Also, I make a difference between Liberalism, which is an ideology and a cultural phenomenon, and self-professed Liberals (as I do between Conservatives and Conservatism). Real people is always much more complex than the ideas or creeds they profess. Unfortunately, this distinction is too burdensome to be made in every discussion, but it is worth while to restate, now and then.

My imaginary army of stereotypical liberal people leaving for a Holy War against Islam, is just a way to ironize about the hipocrisy and contradictions of the European liberal establishment. It’s a grotesque caricature, but as all caricatures, it exalts a specific aspect of reality.

@Jonathan:What has happened to a sense of duty and to commitment? [in re: feminism]

Nobody has a “duty” to get married. Sheesh, not even traditionalist Catholics believe that (especially when they tell their kids stories about Roman saints who rejected forced marriages and met martyrdom as a consequence.)

Where the trads and I part company is that nobody has a “duty” to have children, either. This works for men as well as women. Many men no more want children than another hole in the head. Best that those who don’t want them don’t have them.

You are still dealing in red herrings. Don’t they start to stink after a while?

Utopianism was not an Enlightenment philosophy. No, it was not.
If Voltaire is not good enough for you, might I suggest the US Constitution as an example of the hard nosed pragmatism of the era?
Or if you can handle some really high-flown stuff, the works of Kant.

This post is as good an example as any of why we’re very, very lucky to have Rod Dreher.

+1!

This blog is a unique place, Rod. I like to describe it to people as “the best comment section in the American blogosphere”, and much of that is due to your moderation. (Your actual writing is wonderful too, and I plan to buy your new book, but I always enjoy the comment sections as much as the blog posts here).

I’ve been trying to get more of my friends interested in your blog, and I post TAC pieces pretty often on my Facebook.

“The sense I am getting from this thread is that the angst people here have is that their viewpoint is not being promoted (by the govt, media, anyone who gives the impression of authority?) as the proper viewpoint that everyone should have. Is that correct? ”

No”

So what is it then? This much seems to be true from all the comments here, which of these is incorrect?

1. You don’t want autonomy, you want to be given meaning (by whom? that has not yet been clearly stated)
2. You want your view to be considered ‘normal’ by ‘popular culture’ and any that is different no so.
3. You want that ‘not-normal’ views to be not much seen or heard.

To get any traction as a movement, I doubt 2 and 3 will help. I would say better to focus on what benefits you get from your viewpoints and explain those well.

With regards to 1, that is a very interesting subject actually. What benefit do you get from it? What does autonomy mean anyway? You will find appreciation of the interconnectedness of things in Hinduism and Buddhism too. This is not a philosophy but an observable fact. Anything we create depends on the work of others. If we are alive and survive, ditto. I don’t think there is anybody who will dispute that.

So then what is this autonomy that you fear? Why do you fear it? And who exactly should be giving you meaning that will satisfy you?

Re: Where the trads and I part company is that nobody has a “duty” to have children, either.

It’s very odd that trads would think such a thing when in fact the most traditional POV of Christianity is that celibacy (and of course) childlessness are superior moral states. Natalism was an Age of Reason concept, once Protestantism made marriage almost mandatory.

Utopianism and Enlightment go arm in arm. The most relevant political implementations of Enlightment principles included a strong element of Utopia. French revolution first and foremost. Not to acknowledge that the likes of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Marx are very much heirs of Enlightment – via Hegel – is to deny the history of Philosophy. That the anglo-saxon version of Enlightment veered towards American pragmatism and utilitarianism doesn’t change this fact.

Nope. That’s a caricature. Again, study the period and read the writings of the time.
And since you’ve brought up the French Revolution let me recommend as I have in the past, Mme. de Stael’s Considerations On The Principle Events Of The French Revolution. It is at times self-dramatizing and she spares no effort in praising her father (Jacques Necker) but she lived through it first hand, was close to many of the principals, and spent the rest of her life trying to grapple with it intellectually, since she remained an unshaken but moderate liberal– and a Christian in the Swiss Reformed tradition, her colorful personal life notwithstanding. (The work was published after her death.) Her attitude is not utopian nor pessimistic, but rather scientific in a French rationalist sort of way. I rather agree with her: rerun the history but alter some of the particulars and the whole business might have turned out very differently.

Mme de Staël is for sure an interesting reading. I confess that I read her in anthology, although in French, and I think that she’s one of then very few likable people of that time. If you have made your way through her 600 pages tome, chapeau. But I wouldn’t look at her views as typical . For sure she is critical of Jacobinist totalitarianism, (she doesn’t call it so, of course) which also donned itself with scientism (another crippled child of Enlightment) However, much as she is a commendable observer, her influence on the mainstream revolutionary thought was nought.